Upton Sinclair s The Jungle A Self Proclaimed Socialist

Upton Sinclair the author of The Jungle a self proclaimed socialist. Wanted to show what the meatpacking industry was like from an outside perspective. Novelist have free rein when writing a novel but in this case Sinclair did not have the proper evidence to back up his version of the meat packing industry. The version that Sinclair portrayed in The Jungle was of appalling working conditions. The way he described it was diseased and rotten. The community of these workers were as misrepresented as packers and packinghouse products. He portrays Jurgis as a helpless animal that is wounded, the target for unseen enemies. Sinclair came from an old money out of Virginia. His family’s wealth and land were wiped during the civil war leaving his father to become a liquor salesman then during him into an alcoholic. When Sinclair was 26 he went to Chicago to research the strike and conditions the meat-packers had. He interviewed the families, lawyers, doctors and social workers. What he observed was appalling conditions inside the meat-packing factories. Chicago was one of the biggest meat-packing industries at the turn of the century in the U.S. He wanted to show how the immigrants lived and the conditions they had to put up with. Sinclair shares a powerful fictional story of an immigrant family that was fooled tactics that took the little they had. Sinclair gave the readers a very vivid image from Jurgis’s point of view. But not everything that Sinclair illustrated was true to the